The fund services outlook is changing. The landscape is awash with regulatory developments from AIFMD through to ‘Brexit’. More reports and board packs are required than ever before, increasing costs and straining resources for service providers.
We work with a number of fund and trust administrators worldwide. It’s an increasingly competitive industry and standards are rising rapidly as a result. We see three common reporting challenges for growing firms, seeking to stand out from the competition.
Expectations are rising, driven by better technology at work and at home. Directors are no longer happy to wait to receive packs, requiring instant access on the go. Tolerance for inefficient solutions such as searching through emails, opening multiple attachments or working with clunky file share systems is also diminishing.
Board pack collation is a core service but takes time. The more manual the process, the more time and the higher the risk of a critical error. So, how can firms cope with the increasing volume of reporting and continue to grow without increasing the burden on the team?
Information security is a hot topic. Keeping your business and your clients’ businesses safe can be daunting without the right tools.
There’s no such thing as an average fund service firm, with client numbers ranging from 5 to 1000s, but the challenge of efficiently delivering board and briefing packs is common to all.
So, what’s the solution?
Board portals are already commonplace across large corporates and the public sector. A good board portal is perhaps even more useful to service providers than to a standalone organisation. If you’re new to them, have a read through our introductory guide to board portals.
With many providers available and widely varying standards, finding a good portal provider who understands your industry will make a world of difference:
Board Portals provide instant delivery of packs to your directors’ tablet or computer. No more couriers delivering packs to the wrong place, no more frustrating email searches, no more heavy briefcases. Whether using an iPad or a Windows device directors should have one intuitive, secure place to find, search and annotate the materials you provide. A good portal will enhance your brand and should be so easy to use that it will quickly win over even the most sceptical directors.
The best board portals pay just as much attention to the reporting burden as to the director experience. One fund provider using Manage, our pack builder tool, saw time-savings of 80% from when they used to manually collate and publish packs. It automates and streamlines the production process, and addresses all of the common pain points from last minute updates and late papers through to dealing with different formats and page sizes. Issuing packs becomes a fast, three click process. Crucially for the fund service industry a pack production system like this can also scale to allow easy access management and workflow across a larger team.
We all know that emailed PDF reports are not secure and we’ve heard one too many stories of directors leaving their paper packs on the plane… A good board portal solves these security worries; with industry leading encryption, secure authentication and remote wipe facilities for lost devices. Your clients can access reports, safe in the knowledge that their most sensitive data is secure.
If you’re curious to hear how fund and trust administrators are delivering the best customer experience and saving resources with our board portal modules: Read and Manage, please contact Nasri using the button below.